


Eclipse Season

by theheartischill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Slice of Life, solar eclipse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-01-26 12:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12557708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheartischill/pseuds/theheartischill
Summary: Sirius wanted to go. He wanted to get out, to escape, to run, fly, somersault out of the castle and keep going. He wanted to be not-here, but there was no there he wanted to land at; he wanted to be moving, going, leaving. Where? Anywhere, but not for long. Anywhere as long as it was away.(Or: two boys, three snapshots.)





	Eclipse Season

_You know_  
_the reason for the red berries_  
_darkening, and the road outside_  
_darkening, but did you know_  
_that the wedding_  
_of light and gravity  
_ _is forever?_

_—_ Eavan Boland, “Pinhole Camera”

 

_10 July 1972_

There are magics older than what they teach you in school. Older and deeper, too, woven into the shifting of the earth and the inexorable turning of celestial bodies, into the tides and the wind and the phases of the moon. There are reasons fairy tales warn even Muggle children away from the dark places: caves that only appear uninhabited, forests with no straight path, the streets of your own village after the sun has set. Even Muggles are not quick to forget the kind of power that lives there.

This was what Sirius’s father explained to him as they traveled. The natural order had immense power; disruptions to that order had more. Or they had a different power, one which was his right by blood but would never be mentioned at _that institution_. _That institution_ was what he had called Hogwarts since the day of Sirius’s sorting. At first it had made Sirius feel terribly ashamed, then irritated and embarrassed; by now he had begun to feel his father should have begun to get over his disappointment. He claimed it was directed at the school, but he had barely looked at Sirius his first holiday home.

Sirius was listening less attentively than he knew he should. They were flying towards Nova Scotia, because the boys were too young to Apparate and Sirius’s mother believed in making an entrance. Sirius was trying to listen to his father, but he was feeling his grip on the handle of his broom and thinking of scrimmaging with James after exams, Remus and Peter taking turns charming small objects—a roll of parchment from a final paper, a balled-up pair of socks none of them were willing to lay claim to, something slimy and tentacled nicked from the Potions corridor—for James and Sirius to chase after, snatch mid-air, hurl at each other until they were laughing too hard to balance. He was trying to listen as his father explained that any reversal is a source of magic for those who know how to channel it, but he was thinking that there wouldn’t be any openings on the Gryffindor team next year, but after that both Beaters and one of the Chasers would be graduating, and Sirius thought by then they might have a shot; he was thinking that if they could find a passageway near enough to the Slytherin common room, they might be able to pull off this time the April Fools’ Day prank that had fizzled into a swamp of unfortunate odors and Saturday detentions; he was thinking he owed Remus a letter, but nothing about his life seemed as easy to describe as it had that morning on the train—was it less than a year ago?—when he had outlined his lineage with a haughtiness that now made him burn around the ears.

They landed in a clearing, with families Sirius knew by sight from events where he’d stood awkward and obedient in an itchy set of dress robes. The air began to cool and dim. In the center of the clearing was some still-bloody carcass sprawled brokenly; _a sacrifice_ , Sirius thought, and felt a shiver of something between curiosity and disgust. Some of the adults threw up a dome of magic above their heads, which Sirius could feel as surely as if he were touching it. There was an incantation, in Latin, and everyone knelt. Sirius stole a glance at Regulus, who looked openly bored, and felt closer to his brother than he had in months. The shadows twisted on the ground.

Sirius could feel it when the world went dark. Not the cold, or the shock of the sun blotted out of the sky, but the magic, swirling around the heads of the gathering, seeping into the dirt. A more potent form of the magic that hummed through the rooms at Grimmauld Place. And he could feel, too, how it was being channeled, or warped, or twisted like the disappearing shadows, swallowed up into something dark and grand. He didn’t want to be there, suddenly. He didn’t let himself name what he was feeling as fear, but he thought _I want to go home_. When he thought _home_ , he realized, he didn’t picture his four-poster bed or the antique dining sets; he pictured Peter’s laughter, and Remus’s tiny, careful handwriting, and James pushing his glasses up his nose. Sirius was a disappointment, but he was other things, too.

 

_11 May 1975_

The rest of the school was gathered to watch in the Great Hall, the ceiling recalibrated for a few hours to display the sky over somewhere in Greenland, where the sun would be most obscured. But Sirius had declared eclipses “stupid” and the fascination with them “bourgeois,” a term which Sirius had picked up some months ago and immediately set to work using to prove that a little knowledge was, indeed, a dangerous thing.

“The moon shows up for thirty seconds where it’s not supposed to,” he groused, lighting a cigarette. “Big fucking deal. I do that once a week and all I get is _Sirius, are you drunk_ and _Sirius, this is the ladies’ room_ and _Ten points from Gryffindor, Black_.” He took a drag and scowled at the ground.

Remus gave a hum he hoped was both non-committal and non-threatening. At other times, he might have objected, reasonably, that in fact a regular but unusual astronomical event in fact had little in common with Sirius’s propensity for wandering off alone when he was too sloshed to see straight, but Sirius had been impossible lately, and Remus was trying to avoid giving him any ammunition for fight-picking. Besides, at heart he agreed with Sirius about the virtues of the eclipse; no one had ever needed to prove to him the power of the moon.

Peter was watching for badly needed extra credit in Astronomy, and James was no doubt hoping to “accidentally” find himself seated next to Lily Evans, so it was just the two of them out in the yard behind the Shack, which even in May remained arid and dusty, the better, Remus assumed, to keep alive the rumors of the ghost. In the fall, Remus had overheard some seventh-years passing on to wide-eyed third-years gearing up for their first Hogsmeade trip a tale about a fatal brawl between two wizards from decades ago whose bloodlust could not be quelled even in their own deaths, a fight that revived itself in the abandoned house even after the bodies had been cleared and buried; he’d smiled ruefully to think that he was in more than one respect the creature who haunted stories whispered in the dark.

“I mean, don’t you just get _sick_ of the whole thing?” Sirius said, suddenly animated.

“The moon? Oh, sometimes,” Remus said. “Once a month or so.”

“That’s not what I—sorry.” Sirius winced. It was an uncharacteristic expression on his face, almost as alien as an apology out of his mouth. Remus didn’t like it. He didn’t like feeling like he held some sort of trump card, like the _thing_ inside him would always supersede the boy he was. Almost was. “I didn’t mean the moon. I meant—all of _this._ ” He gestured dismissively in the direction of the castle.

“School?”

“School, but not just school. Not just Hogwarts. Do you ever get sick,” and here Sirius leaned forward, eyes intent in a dangerous way, “of all this _magic_?”

Remus almost said, no, he didn’t get tired of convenience and access, of techniques that spared other scarce resources. Pure-blooded wizards got sick of magic, maybe, the way the very rich occasionally got sick of money: a fashionable malaise intended to display their superior capacity for awareness. But Sirius turned to him then, looking desperately earnest and so un-Sirius-like that Remus thought for a moment. He thought of what was inside him: the ugliness and pain of the change, the twinges in his veins as the moon swelled each month. And almost more than the wolf itself, the secret. The constant apart-ness, never able to belong with his whole self. The memory of the hospital attendant backing away when he lifted a bandaged hand to ask for water, the knowledge of how others would look at him if they knew. And he said, “Sometimes, maybe. Yeah. I do.”

He had thought, or hoped, that might bring Sirius some relief. But Sirius just looked at him, eyes dark and unreadable.

Remus knew better than to ask Sirius what was wrong; Peter had tried, guilelessly, _Are you all right, mate_ , and James had tried in exasperation, _Sirius, what the fuck is your problem_ , and both had been rewarded with denial and exacting dissections of their many flaws of character and physique. It was Sirius’s worst trait, how quick he was to turn his wit, his intelligence, his close eye for the people he cared for into a weapon. Remus had no interest in hearing what Sirius had been saving up about him. But he was having trouble letting it go: not just the sulkiness or the temper or the minor acts of delinquency, which were and had always been par for the course, but how much he seemed lately like a live wire. Swearing at Slytherin first-years tripping over their robes in the halls, stalking into classes twenty minutes late with his chin held at a defiant angle, like he was daring the professor to dole out consequences. Insulting his friends almost as freely as his enemies, turning into a mean drunk after one or two drinks. Fouling out of a Quidditch match so severely he’d been benched for the next three games and the Hufflepuff Beater had needed to go to the infirmary. It was irritating, but it was concerning, too.

Then Sirius said, “I don’t want to go home.”

Remus said, “Oh.” A light spring breeze stirred the dust at their feet. What he knew of Sirius’s home came as much from his own imagination, children’s stories of the adventures of high-born wizards and witches, as from anything Sirius had ever said. But even in the absence of specifics there was no mistaking Sirius’s tone, low and choked with things he hardly ever let slip—bruised and sorry things, like regret, and fear, and a kind of ache. Remus wanted to say _I’m sorry_ , but Sirius was allergic to pity; he wanted to say _Do you want to talk about it_ , but this was Sirius’s version of talking about it, and anyway that wasn’t something they did; he wanted to say _So don’t,_ but it wasn’t that simple. Remus wanted to say _Come home with me, then_ , but he didn’t—Sirius wouldn’t—when he tried to picture it something in his stomach went—he couldn’t say that.

Remus said, “Hang on a minute. What time is it? I’ve got—stay right here, alright? I’ll, I’ll be right back. I promise,” he said, to Sirius’s raised eyebrow. “I promise I’ll be right back. Just—stay here, I need to hurry.”

Even as he was running back to the dormitory, he thought this was stupid, but he had had at this point four full years of practice in ignoring the voice in his head that told him things were stupid. He was less skilled, still, at ignoring the voice that told him things were embarrassing, which this also certainly was, but he shut that one down too because he wanted to do _something_. He wanted to offer Sirius something—a way out of where he was, if only for a moment. A distraction, sure, but Remus was not one to discount the power of distractions. Each month, since they’d pieced it together, the other three always dropped by the infirmary the morning after, but it was always Sirius who first made Remus laugh with something stupid or clever or mean or all three; it was Sirius who brought him back to feeling human.

Maybe he just wanted to pay him back, even once.

It would need to be a group effort: he spilled out the cardboard box of books he’d had since first year, borrowed scissors and Spell-o-tape from James’s nightstand where he kept them to bring to Quidditch matches just in case, nicked some foil from the care package Peter’s mum had sent for the boys to share. He earned some skeptical looks from the portraits as he hustled back, keenly aware once again of being the third least athletic of his friends; Sirius and James would have made the trip without breaking a sweat. But make it he did, out of breath and with a stitch in his side, and with a few minutes left to fiddle with his supplies, judging by the clock above the Hogsmeade Apothecary.

“Remus,” Sirius said, “what the fuck are you doing?”

He sounded baffled, which was already an improvement. “It’s—wait, could you hold this steady,” Remus said, giving Sirius the box so he could stab through it to begin the opening. “I’ll tell you in a moment, help me here with—we need to tape the foil over it, see?” He indicated where his hands were holding it flat, and Sirius nodded and began to work securing it with the roll of tape.

It was an odd kind of reversal of the usual order—Remus giving orders, Sirius obliging, confused but loyal—and it gave Remus a little thrill of power and terror, to be the one in charge for once. To know what he had always been too nervous to test: that Sirius would follow him, too. It should have made him feel better, more secure in himself and his standing, and it did, but it made him feel off-kilter, too. Like he didn’t know what he might ask Sirius for, if he knew he might get it.

He set that thought aside.

“I need a pin,” Remus said, and Sirius unhooked one of the safety pins semi-artfully holding together his semi-artfully torn jeans. Remus used it to poke a hole in the foil, then set his creation—their creation—between them to be admired. “There.”

“So what is this, again?” Sirius said.

“It’s a pinhole camera,” Remus said. “Er, pinhole projector, I guess.” The spell of purposefulness had been broken, and now he felt awkward and unsure, the little box unworthy of the excitement. But he persevered, because he had had a plan, and a reason for the plan. “It shows the sun—you can watch it change, inside the box, because of how the rays—it’s to do with optics, and, and the physics of light, and—it’s how Muggles watch an eclipse without going blind. My mum showed me how to make one, years ago.” What he couldn’t bring himself to say but hoped Sirius would understand was: it was a kind of magic, but a kind of Muggle magic. A magic that didn’t need to be trained or mixed or charmed or bought, a magic that rested on the oldest tools they had, wizard and Muggle alike: what you could do with a little cleverness, and careful hands.

Sirius had never needed to be clever, and would never have needed it, could have spent his whole life purchasing or magicking around all the junctures at which most people would have had to learn to _think_. But he was clever anyway, and he was capable of thought, although he exercised this capacity less than he should. And—this Remus remembered with a soft cloud of relief as Sirius peered into the pinhole, focused, and softened his gaze as he saw the shadows captured there—he admired cleverness in others. He was generous about it, as eager for the ideas of his friends as he was ready to share his own, and he liked the unusual solution, the suggestion rooted in some faraway personal history. This was perhaps the best part of Sirius: that he could be more interested in who people could become, who they decided to be, than in who they already were. It wasn’t a piece of him that showed up often.

But it was, in a very literal way, the piece that made it possible for them to be friends, the kind of friend Remus had not thought he was allowed to have: the cleverness that had led Sirius to the truth about Remus, and the ability to decide that _that_ was not the most important truth.

“That’s brilliant,” Sirius murmured approvingly. He looked at Remus and smiled—a rare Sirius smile, not cocky or cynical or lazy or sarcastic or lascivious or bitter or cruel. Just a flash of delight on Sirius’s face, but oh—oh, Remus realized with a lurch, he would have followed that smile anywhere. A smile like the moon: binding him to its movements, whether he wanted it or not.

He wanted—Remus wanted—he didn’t know what he wanted.

“Yeah, well,” he said, once more as awkward as he had ever been, “it should be starting soon, so. We can watch it like this.”

And to anyone looking, they did, sitting side-by-side, watching a tiny sun in a tattered box shrink to a crescent and bloom outwards again. But if Sirius was watching the sun, Remus was watching the boy next to him. When it was over, he was still watching.

 

_23 October 1976_

Sirius wanted to go. He wanted to get out, to escape, to run, fly, somersault out of the castle and keep going. He wanted to be not-here, but there was no _there_ he wanted to land at; he wanted to be moving, going, leaving. Where? Anywhere, but not for long. Anywhere as long as it was _away_.

He wanted more than that, actually—wanted to punch someone or break something or drink until he couldn’t feel his legs, wanted to race back to London on foot and burn his ancestral home to the ground, wanted to get in a proper fight, a nasty one, and emerge limping and bleeding and icing his eye—but he was trying, a little, to be better. To pick the second- or even third-worst idea, instead of always the most disastrous. To become a little closer to the kind of person who would deserve being forgiven the way Remus Lupin had forgiven him in March. Sirius had had a lot of time to think about the situation in guilty, sleepless nights through the spring while Remus slept across the room from him, and more time at home over the miserable summer, alone in his room for weeks at a time, and what he had decided was: it would be alright, if he could be better.

So: sixth year, fresh start, he did most of his homework, he showed up for most classes, mostly on time, ish, more or less. He did not swear in front of the first-years, and sometimes he gave them directions when their tiny idiot faces looked lost. He still, Merlin help him, fucking fucking hated fucking Severus fucking Snape and always would without regret until his dying day, but he restricted himself to insults and dirty looks, except when he didn’t. No curses, no hexes, no jinxes, no dung-bombs dropped surreptitiously into his bag—that was the plan, and he stuck to the plan, when he wanted to stick to the plan more than he wanted to fuck with Severus’s life, which was, you know, sometimes. He offered to help Peter with Potions assignments, instead of rolling his eyes and giving fake answers, although sometimes he did both. He did not call James a class-traitor when he tried to eat with Lily Evans instead of them, nor did he threaten to fill his sheets with porcupine quills and newt-tails in retaliation. When Remus said _Sirius would you kindly shut up so I can work_ , he shut up, as kindly as he knew how. He was not entirely sure he did know how to be kind—he had had ample opportunity, while at Grimmauld Place, to reflect on all the things that had never been taught in that house—but he was trying, sort of, more days than not.

And when the old itch came on him, the sense of drowning that became yearning for chaos and ruin, an almost physical desire for a rough surface on which to crash land, he did not hit anyone or break anything or drink himself unconscious. He became Padfoot and made James throw him sticks by the forest. He dug his palms into stone crawling through tunnels past curfew for map research. He talked too fast, maybe, and too much, probably, and too loudly, certainly, but for these minor sins he was forgiven easily, again and again.

It did not make him feel better. It did not make breathing come easier, or help him fall asleep at night. But it helped him stick to the plan.

He had not yet told anyone he was not going back.

Remus was alone in the common room when Sirius came down, reading—not homework, Sirius thought, some other thick book. “You’re up early,” Remus said.

Up late, actually, having at last abandoned sleep in the first stirrings of the gray dawn, but there was no reason for Remus to know that. “Yes, well, you know me. Nothing I love more than the promise of a bright new day on which to work hard and succeed! Carpe diem, seize the day, and all that. Early to bed and early to rise.”

“Oh dear,” murmured Remus. “He’s been body-snatched. Whatever shall we do.” He turned a page.

“You have as many hours in the day as Celestina Warbeck! The early jobberknoll gets the flobberworm!”

“Jobberknolls are nocturnal.”

“Really? Shit. So much for that essay.”

“I offered you my notes.”

“You did. Your valiant efforts will not go unrecognized. Let’s get out of here.”

“Is breakfast even being served yet?”

“I mean, _out of here_. Out of _this_. Elsewhere.”

Remus glanced up. “What, like Hogsmeade?”

“Yes. No.” Hogsmeade wasn’t far enough. “Like let’s have an _adventure_ , Moony, we’re _wizards_ , we could go _anywhere_ —“

“You can’t Apparate or Disapparate anywhere on Hogwarts grounds.”

“Since when are we confined to the grounds?”

“We’re under-age.”

“But—alright, let’s start with Hogsmeade, and then—oh,” and he was feeling the thrill of an idea, “you know how their post office has got that cabinet full of Portkeys?”

“The one that says ‘do not touch without staff assistance’?”

“Like they could stop us. We’ll pick a good one and we’ll just go. Think of the fun, Remus. Think of the new sights, and the exotic foods, and the foreign tongues, and the _foreign tongues, if you know what I mean._ ” He waggled his eyebrows.

Remus pursed his lips, thinking but not, Sirius was afraid, of what fun it would be, even though for all he knew they’d touch an old comb and wind up at a beauty parlor in Manchester, terrifying old ladies. Although that didn’t sound _not_ fun.

“I have a mountain of work, Sirius,” he said finally, with what Sirius optimistically chose to believe was a hint of regret. “McGonagall let me move the take-home essay from two weeks ago since I was out when it was assigned and it’s got to be done by Monday. Why don’t you ask the others?”

“Peter thinks he’s coming down with something, you know what a hypochondriac he can be, and James is practicing decorative charms with Evans,” Sirius lied.

Remus frowned. “I thought they were on the outs again.”

“Oh, who can keep straight the fickle whims of Woman,” Sirius said, mostly for the pleasure of watching Remus roll his eyes. In fact he had no idea what James had been planning for the day, and as far as he knew Peter was the picture of health. But he didn’t want Peter, who laughed freely and often and made everything feel easy, so easy it was sometimes disappointing. And he didn’t even want James, the constant that aligned Sirius’s world, James who made everything _right_ , somehow, who made it seem obvious that whatever circuitous turns fate had had him take, Sirius had arrived exactly where he should be all along.

Sirius didn’t feel right this morning. He felt unmoored and restless and lonesome and _wrong_. And maybe—probably—he should have waited until James was awake, knowing that with James around, the inner ache, the sense of his bones being the wrong size for his skin, would ease. But in a perverse way, he didn’t want it to; he wanted to dig into it, like picking at a scab. He wanted Remus, who could leave him off-balance and unsure, the china shop to his proverbial bull.

“Moony,” he said, kneeling in front of him and waiting until Remus met his eyes, “please.”

And Remus’s mouth was a careful line but Sirius knew he had him, because he knew Remus would not say no to a certain plainspoken earnestness he took care to use sparingly for precisely that reason; and he thought that maybe knowing this, and using it anyway, made him a bad friend, and he wondered if maybe he should take the whole thing back, now that he had won through dubious methods.

But then Remus was shrugging and placing the old quill he used as a bookmark between his pages, and Sirius, Merlin forgive him, was too overcome with gladness to be sorry about it.

They changed into Muggle clothes, or what Remus called and Sirius had trained himself to believe were proper clothes, to avoid impeding their future wandering: Sirius in all black, with a leather jacket he’d bought when he and James had spent a day in June, after term had ended but before he’d had to go home, wandering around London; and Remus in an ensemble that would have been wholly sensible had it not predated his last late growth spurt, and left poking out the bony bits at his ankles and wrists. It made Sirius feel unaccountably tender to notice, a feeling he would normally have kicked away with a line like _You look like a shopkeeper who sells antique dollhouses to collectors with bad breath_. But he was trying to be better, a little, so he swallowed it, and tried not to notice it again.

At the post office in Hogsmeade Remus charmed one of the bushes outside to cry like a child so that the lone attendant went out back to investigate; once inside they puzzled briefly over the selection of Portkeys until Sirius grabbed a stuffed dog out of something between narcissism and impulse.

They arrived on their backs and dizzy, breathing to steady themselves after transit.

“You are really,” Remus said, “the vainest person I have ever met.”

Sirius propped himself up on his elbows just to grin in Remus’s face, but his heart wasn’t in it. He had hoped for—he didn’t know what, but something that smacked of Adventure at first glance. Instead they were in what seemed like a small and very crowded square in what looked like an entirely ordinary city. He felt disappointed, and suddenly exhausted.

An older man, with tufts of white hair around his ears and wire-rim glasses atop his bulbous nose, hurried over to them. “Welcome, welcome! So nice to have some of the younger crowd joining us.”

“Joining you?” said Sirius.

The man chuckled. “Portkey travel is rough, innit?” He had an accent Sirius was having trouble placing. “Once I was going from Victoria to Tuscon and I just about forgot my name. But don’t worry, lads. You’re in the right place. We’ll have a great view here, and you can buy refreshments and goggles over on the lawn. And we’ve totally secured the area.”

“Well,” said Remus, slowly getting to his feet. “That’s a relief. Wouldn’t want to wind up in an unsecured area.”

The man smiled at Sirius. “Sensible friend you’ve got there.”

“Yes,” Sirius agreed, “pathologically.” He stood up, wincing. Some other travelers were arriving nearby and the man was turning to greet them. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. It was not autumn here; the leaves were young and green. The crowd mostly ranged from thirties to well past middle age, in khakis and Oxfords or Ministry-appropriate robes, with some families who had brought their children. _Brought them to what_ , Sirius wondered, before noticing a row of booths offering sandwiches, coffee, and—he squinted to read the hand-painted sign— _Ernest Elliott’s Excellent Eclipse lEnses! Polished AND charmed for double the protection!_ There was a line to purchase them from the garishly dressed wizard manning the stand. “What on earth,” he said, and then began quietly to panic: were his parents here? Could they find him? What would they do if they did—drag him back to London, kicking and screaming, or simply take the unexpected excuse to excoriate him once again? Nothing he hadn’t already survived, but nothing he wanted to live through again—and nothing, he thought, feeling a bit sick, he wanted Remus to have to see.

Remus was sketching out a globe in the air with his wand—a nice bit of work, Sirius could acknowledge even through his nerves; Remus’s off-the-cuff charms, while not as showy as his and James’s, often had a delicate grace in their execution. A sparkling little star circled it, searching, and landed on what he assumed was their location. “We’ve landed in Melbourne,” Remus said. “Australia. Among, it seems, an eclectic and welcoming coven of eclipse-chasers.”

“Australia?” Sirius said. It was a bit of a relief: no magic was dark or deep enough to bring his mother to the continent she only ever referred to, in tones of scorn, as _the penal colony_. But, on the other hand: “ _Australia?_ ”

Remus shrugged. “If you had somewhere else in mind, maybe you should have thought about it for, oh, eight or nine seconds.”

Sirius felt himself deflate. He was tired and his head hurt and his plans for a spontaneous and thrilling adventure had led him to a hopelessly polite and well-behaved gaggle of the stably employed. “Fuck it. Let’s go home.”

“Why? Too _bourgeois_ for you?”

“Too fucking _dull_. I wanted an _adventure._ ” He could _feel_ himself pouting, but he could not stop.

 “Some say that wisdom lies in knowing that the truest adventure is looking without judgment into lives unlike our own,” Remus intoned, infuriatingly serene.

“Is that one of Dumbledore’s? Smug old git.”

“Someone’s cranky,” Remus chided. “You haven’t eaten. Let’s get you a sandwich.” He started walking towards the stands.

Sirius felt his shoulders tensing, even though or because Remus was in all possibility correct. “Don’t patronize me, Lupin.”

Remus turned back around and shot him one of his withering prefect looks. “Then don’t act like a child, _Black_.” And for a moment Sirius bought it, the whole scolding schoolmaster routine, and he felt annoyed and humiliated and small. Then a smile broke through on Remus’s face, a big stupid grin he ducked his face to hide. Sirius liked that—the way Remus didn’t seem to know what to do with his own mirthfulness. It felt like an accomplishment.

“You’re actually enjoying this,” Sirius marveled. “And why shouldn’t you. We found the world’s most boring way to sneak out. It’s perfect for you.”

“Ssh,” Remus said, finger on his lips. “Don’t tell Sirius. He will be _unbearably_ smug.”

“Sirius _Black?_ He would never. Let’s get sandwiches,” Sirius declared, his spirits rallying once more. “And some fucking _coffee_.”

They bought sandwiches, and coffee, and Sirius bought a pair of glasses from Ernest Elliott, which he continued to refer to as luh- _ENses_ , in keeping with the sign, so that Remus would call him stupid while trying not to laugh. He hadn’t been planning to buy them, but he thought Remus might want a pair but not have the coins for it, and Remus was touchier about money than he was about the werewolf thing. So he’d bought a pair ostensibly for himself, then made a big to-do about the magnanimity of his generosity (“Redundant _and_ nonsensical; well done!” Remus had unhelpfully commented) such that he might be persuaded to share.

They found an unused spot of grass on which to eat. Sirius was done with his sandwich while Remus was still working on the first half of his, and still hungry besides, so he got up to get another one and in doing so spilled his coffee on the edge of Remus’s cardigan.

“Shit, shit, sorry—“

“It’s fine, Pads, look, I can just— _Scourgify_ —“

But because the moon was already beginning to cross the edge of the sun, or because the vocabulary of charms worked differently on the other side of the Equator, or because they were still woozy from transit, the coffee stayed in place.

“Interesting,” Remus murmured. “I wonder why—?” Sirius could almost hear him making research plans in his head for when they returned.

“Take mine,” Sirius said, taking his jacket off.

“Don’t be absurd, it’s just a little coffee.”

“No, no, I insist,” Sirius said, feeling strangely desperate about this, like he had felt strangely desperate this morning, trying to get Remus to come with him. Remus had come and Sirius had spilled on his unattractive too-small antiques shopkeeper cardigan and this seemed, somehow, an unbearable sin that must be rectified. “We’ll trade for a day, it’ll be fun. Let me indulge my gentlemanly impulses. Also, I will fight you on this. It will be long, and stupid.”

“Such altruism.” But Remus was already taking his cardigan off.

Once they had traded, Remus said, “I must look ridiculous.”

“You don’t, actually,” Sirius said, considering. Remus looked uncomfortable and ill-at-ease in Sirius’s jacket, but Remus almost always looked uncomfortable and ill-at-ease in his own body, as though he were afraid that at any moment someone would come to inform him that there had been a mistake and he would have to give it up for good. And it fit him better than his own clothes; they were almost the same height now. It was of course a little funny to think of Remus in his clothes, but it was a little nice, too. Nice in a way that made him want to kick something over, but he was trying to be better, so he went to buy a sandwich.

By the time he came back with a sandwich and new coffee for himself and an oversized cherry Danish—Remus’s favorite—for them to share, as penance, the light was beginning to dim. They talked while waiting, in the cooling air, about nothing much at all: about the patterns in eclipse lore in different ancient culture worldwide (Remus) and prognostications for next year’s World Cup (Sirius); about whether James and Lily had any real chance, and how weird it was to think of any of them getting married someday, or doing something as hideously adult as having a child; about whether there really was a war coming, and whether anyone this year would top the two hundred and seventy-five points Sirius had lost from Gryffindor in one fell swoop during last year’s St. Mungo’s festivities. Sirius put the glasses on and had to admit there was something to admire in the curve of blackness across the sun; Remus put the glasses on and Sirius felt there was more to admire in the way he smiled looking up at the sky, a shock of pure delight that washed away the carefulness with which Remus constrained his own movements.

It was hardly an adventure they were having, but Sirius could not bring himself to regret it. Away from school, away from anywhere his family would be caught dead setting foot, he could hold on to just himself and Remus, sitting on the grass. He felt what was for him the rarest of emotions: contentment. He was glad, truly, to just sit, and just talk, and just be, for once.

And maybe this was what his fucking problem was and always had been: this awareness brought a flare-up of the familiar itch, the push-pull towards something stupid and reckless and _big_. He wanted to say to Remus, _I am never going back to that fucking house_ , and to tell him about how his parents had locked him up for real this summer, sent him meals through a slot they’d cut into his bedroom door as a last-ditch attempt to break him back into the compliance befitting an heir. He wanted to tell Remus how in the hours alone something had clicked for him, finally, about how it wasn’t really breaking away if he still acted like a Black, just for the other team, but he didn’t know any other way to be. He wanted to ask Remus _Do you think I’m a good person_ and _would you trust me with your life_ and _why do you bother with me anyway_ , not because he couldn’t guess at the answers but for the selfish pleasure of hearing Remus say them, of having them to file away to tell himself later, when he needed it. He wanted to kiss Remus, just to see what Remus would do, or to see how it would feel, to prove something to himself, one way or another.

But Sirius was trying to be better. He was trying to break nothing but habits, to destroy only his ties to his past. He wanted to believe he could have this: a simple happiness. Even if only for an hour at a time. Even if only halfway around the world from anything he’d ever known. And if there was a war coming—which he had started to believe there would be, listening through the floorboards to his parents and their guests over the summer—he wanted to believe that someday when it was over, they could have times like this again. Like peace. He wanted this day to become a memory they could keep together and laugh about, maybe, in a future where days like this still happened: the day they went to Australia by accident and ate sandwiches under an eclipse. A day where Sirius wanted something, or too many somethings, and Remus maybe wanted something too, under his hidden smiles, and they found it, or didn’t, but they were together, and no one got hurt.

It didn’t seem like much to ask.

So he did his part. He made a tasteless joke about the prefect bathroom, and accepted the smack Remus gave him in good humor. He asked if he could borrow the cardigan for Halloween, as he’d been thinking of going as an elderly witch’s Ministry-employed nephew with poor social skills. He laughed when Remus did his impression of James combing his fingers through his hair, and laughed harder when Remus did his impression of Sirius flirting with seventh-year girls in Defense. When the world went dark, Sirius thought, first, _I want to go home,_ then, _I want to make a home_. Without thinking, he reached for Remus’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the R/S Games 2017, Team Sirius. Eclipse data comes from this list of solar eclipses in the twentieth century and the eclipse maps at timeanddate.com; my use of this rigorously compiled information is definitely more Sirius than Remus, i.e., not overly concerned with the strictest accuracy. Thanks to K. for proofreading, and to C. for inspiring this completely by accident in the weirdest possible way. I am on [tumblr](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com).


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